Syncopations: Beats, New Yorkers, and Writers in the Dark

"At a time when much literary criticism remains deliberately abstruse and unduly professionalized, this book, at once anecdotal and quietly argumentative, feels like nothing so much as a fine collection of short stories about the most fascinating people you never met."--Morris Dickstein, author of A Mirror in the Roadway

"To read this book is to watch the workings of a brilliant mind--sharp, quirky, always ready to reimagine texts we thought we knew well and to shed light on others we might have passed over. Campbell fits into no theoretical camp: he is simply one of the rare critics on whom, to cite Henry James, 'nothing is lost.'"--Marjorie Perloff, author of Wittgenstein's Ladder

"Rises above the usual divisions in American literature. James Campbell is one of the most eloquent and consistently challenging writers on the British literary scene."--Caryl Phillips, author of Dancing in the Dark

This compulsively readable collection of profiles and essays by James Campbell, tied together by a beguiling autobiographical thread, proffers unique observations on writers and writing in the post-1950s period. Campbell considers writers associated with the New Yorker magazine, including John Updike, William Maxwell, Truman Capote, and Jonathan Franzen. Continuing his longterm engagement with African American authors, he offers an account of his legal battle with the FBI over James Baldwin's file and a new profile of Amiri Baraka. He also focuses on the Beat poets Gary Snyder and Allen Ginsberg, as well as writers such as Edmund White and Thom Gunn. Campbell's concluding essay on his childhood in Scotland gracefully connects the book's autobiographical dots.

Preface

Acknowledgments

PART I NEW YORK NEW YORKERS

1. Sunshine and Shadows: AProfile of John Updike

2. Updike's Village Sex

3. William Maxwell's Lives

4. Notes from a Small Island: AProfile of Shirley Hazzard

5. Love, Truman: Capote's Letters and Stories

6. Franzen, Oprah, and High Art

7. Drawing Pains: A Profile of Art Spiegelman

8. Listening in the Dark: AProfile of William Styron

PART II THROUGH THE GRAPEVINE

9. I Heard It through the Grapevine: James Baldwin and the FBI

10. The Island Affair: Richard Wright's Unpublished Last Novel

11. The Man Who Cried: John A. Williams

12. All That Jive: Stanley Crouch

13. Love Lost: Toni Morrison

14. The Rhetoric of Rage: AProfile of Amiri Baraka

PART III SYNCOPATIONS

15. High Peak Haikus: AProfile of Gary Snyder

16. Between Moving Air and Moving Ocean: Thom Gunn and Gary Snyder

17. Was That a Real Poem?: Robert Creeley

18. Fifty Years of "Howl"

19. Personal/Political: AProfile of Edmund White

20. To Beat the Bible: AProfile of J. P. Donleavy

21. The Making of a Monster: Alexander Trocchi

22. Travels with RLS

Coda: Boswell and Mrs. Miller; A Memoir of Two Tongues